Last
seconds on this earth. One of the Iraqis moves
back to his vehicle (a farm tractor and trailer?).
Click or right-click image to download MPEG video
(5 MB).

Thursday,
May 6, 2004

Pictures of
wounded men being shot censored by TV

by Robert Fisk

THE pictures are appalling, the
words devastating. As a wounded Iraqi crawls from
beneath a burning truck, an American helicopter
pilot tells his commander that one of three men has
survived his night air attack. "Someone wounded,"
the pilot cries. Then he received the reply: "Hit
him, hit the truck and him," As the helicopter's
gun camera captures the scene on video, the pilot
fires a 30mm gun at the wounded man, vaporising him
in a second.

British and most European television stations
censored the tape off the air last night on the
grounds that the pictures were too terrible to
show. But deliberately shooting a wounded man is a
war crime under the Geneva Convention and this
extraordinary film of US air crews in action over
Iraq is likely to create yet another international
outcry.

American
and British personnel have been trying for weeks to
persuade Western television stations to show video
of the attack. Despite the efforts of reporters in
Baghdad and New York, most television controllers
preferred to hide the evidence from viewers. Only
Canal Plus in France, ABC television in the United
States and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
have so far had the courage to show the shocking
footage. UK military personnel in the Gulf
region have confirmed that the tape is genuine.

[Website
note: we placed a link to the shorter version of
the video on this website on May 5,
2004]

The camera, mounted beside the 30mm cannon of a
US Apache helicopter on patrol over central Iraq on
1 December
[2003], first
picks up movement on a country road, apparently
several hundred metres from an American military
checkpoint. A lorry and a smaller vehicle, probably
a pick-up, come into view and a man -- apparently
unaware of the hovering helicopter -- is seen
moving to a field on the left of the screen. He is
carrying what seems to be a tube with a covering;
it may be a rocket-propelled grenade. One of the
two helicopter pilots is heard to say: "Big truck
over here. He's having a little powwow". The driver
of the pick-up looks around, reaches into the
vehicle, takes out the tube shaped object and runs
from the road into the field. He drops the object
and returns to the truck. The pilot then radios: "I
got a guy running, throwing a weapon." Another
pilot, or a ground controller, instructs him:
"Engage -- smoke him".

At this point, a tractor arrives close to where
the man from the lorry dropped the object in the
field. One of the Iraqis approaches the tractor
driver. The Apache pilot opens fire with his 30mm
cannon, killing first the Iraqi in the field and
then the tractor driver. The camera registers the
bullets hitting the first man. All that is left is
a smudge on the ground.

The pilot then turns his attention to the large
truck, opens fire and waits to see if he has hit
the last of the three men. The third man is seen
crawling, obviously badly wounded, from his cover
beneath the blazing truck. The pilot reports:
"Wait. Someone wounded by the truck". An officer
replies: "Hit him. Hit the truck and him".

The video shows that the incident took four
minutes, during which the two helicopter pilots --
whose names are listed as Nager and
Alioto -- expended 300 high-velocity cannon
rounds at their targets. The tape shows that the
first 15 rounds missed the men. One of the pilots
says: "F***, switching to range auto." The tape
then documents the firing of four bursts of 20
rounds each at the three men.

The pictures, apparently taken through
thermal-imaging cameras, leave no doubt that the
pilot knew his third victim was wounded and
crawling along the ground -- and that whoever gave
him the order to hit him also knew this.

Coming only days after the appalling photographs
of Iraqis being tortured and humiliated by US
troops at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, the new
pictures can only further inflame Arab opinion
throughout the Middle East. It is common Israeli
practice to kill wounded enemies from the air; a
devastating helicopter assault by Israel on a
Hizbollah training camp in Lebanon 10 years ago was
accompanied by a series of attacks in which pilots
sought out wounded guerrillas as they hid behind
rocks in the Bekaa Valley and then fired at
them.

The film, while it shows men acting in a
suspicious manner, does not prove they were
handling weapons. The occupation authorities in
Baghdad chose to keep the incident secret when it
occurred in December. Watching the video images, it
is easy to understand why.